fury5 join:2012-10-18 Louisville, KY 1 edit |
fury5
Member
2012-Oct-18 11:17 pm
[Equipment] TOO much signal? Louisville, KYI had a technician come out to my apartment and look at my signal, since I've been having some intermittent connection issues since last Friday. Occasionally, my speed test will have a 300ms+ ping, look like a zig zag between 0-5mbits (my normal speed test is a solid 30ms ping and 9.5-10mbits), pages will take a long time to load, etc.
Customer service immediately recognized a signal issue, which is why they ordered the tech.
He arrived on Tuesday evening, and ran some sort of tool on his phone and then later on his laptop that took about a minute to gather data from the modem and present a report. I don't remember what he said it was called, but it was showing him that there was actually too much signal getting into the modem - to the tune of about 14 dBmV where the valid range is actually -8 to 8. It had a bunch of green "P"s in several columns, and then a column full of red "F"s.
Apparently somebody had come out to the tap and amplified it for the whole unit, and everybody else on the unit except for me had 4-way splitters hooked up, attenuating their signals to within the -8 to 8 dBmV limit. Me being hooked straight up to the line (since I don't have TV), my modem was getting slammed hard with signal and it was confusing it. So, he hooked up a 4-way splitter between the line and the modem, terminated the other 3 on the splitter, and told me that it was now at about 7-7.5 which was almost perfect.
Well, I'm having the same issue again, and so I looked at my cable modem diagnostics page to see if I could find out that the number was out of range again.
It's showing me that it's crept back up to 9-10 dBmV, unless I'm looking at the wrong number.
Forward Path: Channel Frequency Power SNR BER Modulation 1 591.0 MHz 9.5 dBmV 39.7 dB 0.000 % 256 QAM 2 597.0 MHz 9.1 dBmV 39.3 dB 0.000 % 256 QAM 3 603.0 MHz 9.7 dBmV 38.9 dB 0.000 % 256 QAM 4 633.0 MHz 10.0 dBmV 39.4 dB 0.000 % 256 QAM
He told me to tell customer service to run that tool if I had to call them again, and I have no idea why I didn't immediately write down the name of the tool. I'm going to have to call them again, but I hate having to take time off work to be there for a technician to get in.
Is there anyone here who knows what tool I'm talking about? Would it help prevent an unnecessary tech visit if I specifically told them what to look at, or is it just something they already run in the course of diagnosing me? |